Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) is a fork of KDE3 developed by Timothy Pearson (trinitydesktop.org). The goal of this project is to keep the KDE3.5 computing style alive, as well as polish off any rough edges that were present as of KDE 3.5.10. Along the way, new useful features have be added to keep the environment up-to-date. The current stable release of TDE (3.5.13) was released Nov 1st 2011. A software release update (SRU) for 3.5.13 is planned in late 2012. Current development is on 14.0.0. Both 3.5.13(sru) and 14.0.0 build on Arch with all current libraries.

The Difference Between 3.5.13 & 14.0.0

The versioning change between 3.5.13 and 14.0.0 signifies that backwards compatibility with 3.5.X has been dropped to allow TDE/TQt to install along side KDE4/Qt4 without confict. 14.0.0 will continue to rely on HAL, but subsequent releases will do away with that dependency. 14.0.0 contains the first prototype of media:/ kioslave as a replacement for HAL. 3.5.13 continues backwards compatibility with KDE 3.5.10 code and provides an alternative choice for those that prefer. The 3.5 13 branch will be maintained for the forseeable future.

Currently the remaining TQt name changes are being implemented after which a tentative code 'freeze' is anticipated to allow user testing and bug identification. 14.0.0 will be a true TDE release with all branding, artwork, and graphics changed and updated for this project rather than using the holdover KDE3 stock images. All in all, the desktop functions beautifully on current graphics libs, systemd-tools, libusbx, udisk2 and other newly implemented hardware paradigms.

Trinity Packages for Arch

Currently development packages for Arch Linux are available for both 3.5.13-sru and 14.0.0. If server space is available for hosting, binaries can be provided for testing for both i686 and x86_64.

Binary Packages

Server space has been graciously provided by Axilleas Pi. Install repositories are shown below. Meta package installation for tde is provided under the name 'tde-base'. To install TDE on Arch, simply install with:

pacman -Sy tde-base

Note: On install, you should expect conflicts with tde-sip and tde-sip4-tqt. The TDE packages 'tde-sip' and 'tde-sip4-tqt' are direct replacements for the 'sip' and 'python2-sip' packages. They simply contain additional extensions for TDE. If you encounter these conflicts, the recommended install is:

pacman -Rdd sip python2-sip
pacman -Sy tde-base

Warning: If attempting to install 3.5.13 along side KDE4 you will experience conflicts with libart-lgpl and kdebase-workspace. The libart-lgpl packages are equivalent. The kdebase-workspace conflict is with /etc/ksysguarddrc. Both are in the process of being eliminated.

Starting and Running Trinity on Arch

After a successful install of TDE, starting TDE from the command line or configuring /etc/inittab to launch tdm is straightforward. The init script for the display manager has been renamed from kdm to tdm to avoid conflicts.

Configuring Trinity to work with startx

Trinity provides a normal ‘starttde’ in /opt/trinity/bin. (symlink provided in 3.5.13) The easiest way to start Trinity is to simply add ‘/opt/trinity/starttde’ entry at the end of ~/.xinitrc. If you do not presently have ~/.xinitrc, then simply create it with the following entry:

exec /opt/trinity/bin/starttde

Then from the command line, just type ‘startx’

startx

Configuring Trinity kdm Greeter

Trinity provides a great looking tdm graphical interface. The tde-tdebase PKGBUILD has been updated to install the trinity.desktop file in /etc/X11/sessions. In order to automatically lauch tdm on boot, all that is needed is to edit /etc/inittab and change the runlevel 5 x startup to:

x:5:respawn:/opt/trinity/bin/tdm -nodaemon

If you modified inittab in runlevel 3, you can use ‘# telinit 5’ to initialize the runlevel 5 services from the command line.

If you experiment with other display managers (slim, etc..) please drop a quick howto here.

Note: Final PKGBUILD source files will be moved to the tdepackaging GIT tree after 14.0.0 is released.

Contributors

At present, the Trinity project for Arch Linux is just beginning. Interest in the project and the list of contributors is growing. Anyone wanting to help can simply join in. Please email Calvin Morrison.

Content Distribution

University of Idaho: Mirror 1 [United States]

Jens Dunzweiler: Mirror 2 [Germany]

Inga Muste: Kubuntu LiveCD mirror

Web Team

Calvin Morrison: Website design.

Inga Muste: Website design.

Trinity Resources

The Trinity site has a number of good resources available. As with any rapidly developing project, the documentation is somewhat sparse, but it does provide a good basic road-map to follow here. The mailing list has approximately the same volume as the arch-user list, so it will not overwhelm your inbox. If you want to help with this project, it is strongly recommended that you also join the trinity-devel mailing list. All of the following links are available from the Trinity project site. A quick list of helpful links to the project follows:

Trinity Build Order

The required build order is specified in the Trinity-HowToBuild. After building tdebase, you can start the desktop.

Warning: Trinity should be built from a clean build environment without KDE4 present. Using an Arch chroot (archroot) is the proper way to build. See: DeveloperWiki:Building in a Clean Chroot for details.

Trinity Build Issues

Build in a new Arch chroot

Warning: Trinity on Arch must be built in a clean environment.

Set up your chroot for building by referencing DeveloperWiki:Building in a Clean Chroot. Make sure you configure your 'local' repository in $CHROOT/root/repo and add each package built to the repository as outlined in the DeveloperWiki.

14.0.0 Development Status

The following packages have been successfully built from the TDE GIT tree for the upcoming 3.5.14 release.

TDE GIT Application in Need of Packaging/Updating

The following is a list of packages that need PKGBUILDs create and/or code fixes to build with current libraries. If you can help with the project and code updates then please join us on the trinity-devel list (trinity-devel@lists.pearsoncomputing.net). Visit http://www.trinitydesktop.org/mailinglist.php for more information.